Page 13 of The Edge of Always

Chapter Four

THEN

Luna was 13

Emmett was 14

As they passed a sign declaring that it was a mere twenty miles to Bamburgh, Luna realised that she was fizzing. It was all the excitement, you see, because twenty miles meant that the journey was almost over. They were so close to their holiday cottage, so close. She was desperate to see Emmett.

She wouldn’t be this desperate if she had a phone. But Luna’s mum hadn’t relented on that front. She didn’t care that it might make Luna and Mae social outcasts, the only people in school without one. Luna’s mum said that phones caused brain rot. And cancer. Brain rot and cancer.

She wouldn’t even let Luna have MySpace.

Normally, these things really bothered Luna; she wanted to fit in with everyone else more than she wanted anything else in the whole world. People like Mae, they were made for standing out, but Luna wanted to pass through the world without being noticed by anyone or anything. She didn’t know exactly why she wanted to fly under the radar so much, except it just felt safer that way.

It didn’t seem to matter so much now, though – the phone thing or the MySpace thing or the becoming a social outcast thing. It didn’t even matter that she was wearing a skirt from Tammy Girl, even though all of their stuff was for babies, not now they were very nearly there.

‘You look lovely, Luna.’ Luna’s mum twisted round from her seat in the front. Her mum didn’t often tell Luna that she looked lovely. And while Luna wanted to pass through the world unnoticed, her body seemed to have a different plan entirely. She’d grown so much this last year, her body tall and broad, with muscles that were hard to the touch. Her mum said that Luna had her dad’s physique.

Looking lovely was their mum’s top priority, always. Luna was pretty certain that her mum thought that being scruffy was about as bad as killing someone. That was why Luna wasn’t allowed some Miss Sixty jeans because her mum said that they were for tramps, not for people who want to look lovely.

Her mum gave a pointed look towards Mae.

She’d cried when she saw what Mae was wearing that morning – a stretched-out T-shirt with the face of the Frosties tiger on the front. It was more of a wail than a proper cry. She’d thrown her hands up in the air and started shouting. When she was little, Luna would sometimes hide under the bed when her mum started to shout. She’d just lie there, on the carpet that was thicker than the rest of her bedroom, since it hadn’t been walked on, and wonder what it would be like just to disappear. She could spend hours imagining how peaceful it would be to not be herself, just some spec of dust floating around, all the things she could see. She’d draw it in her head, the things she’d see and do if she were unnoticed. Except that she wouldn’t be able to hang out with Mae. Not Earl or Emmett either.

Emmett.

There’d been no time for thoughts of disappearing that morning, and anyway, Luna wasn’t sure that she’d fit under the bed anymore.

Mae said that Luna’s mum didn’t love their dad anymore because he was scruffy too. And really, Luna thought that it must be hard to live in a house full of scruffy people when looking lovely was all you wanted from your life.

Luna chose always the path of least resistance, which is how she found herself studying maths for almost the whole of the journey. Even though concentrating on the numbers in the textbook she had perched on her lap was making her feel sick.

Their mum clucked her tongue. ‘So scruffy, Mae.’

‘Come on, Jennie, she looks fine.’ Their dad answered.

Mae groaned loudly. They all knew that trying to defend the girls was pointless. It just extended the lecture they’d all get from their mum.

Luna took the opportunity to close the textbook. She sat on her hands to stop them from moving.

‘Fine! If you’re happy for your daughter to be out in public wearing hot pants and a T-shirt she found in a bin!’

‘It wasn’t a bin, Mum, it was a charity shop.’

Their mum ignored Mae. ‘I honestly don’t know what went wrong with her. She’s wild, Michael.’

Luna had to bite her lip, since Mae had started roaring like a lion.

Then everyone was shouting, everyone except Luna. In her head, she was running along the beach so fast that she was drawing in big gulps of sea air. She was running faster than she’d ever run before, her hair streaked out behind her. Emmett was there, too, of course. It wasn’t summer without Emmett.

Luna let the argument wash over her, imagining each emotion as a colour. At the moment, they were hot and bright, but she could change them. She could water them down and make them light and delicate, a suggestion of colour across a page.

Calmer now, she focused her mind – for the millionth time – on the possibilities of summer.

In Luna’s humble opinion, Northumberland was the best place in the whole world. Even their tiny village, Bamburgh, had a gigantic castle right on the seaside. There were beaches and dunes and fields with grass was so long, you could get lost in it. Every summer, a carnival came, and Luna would get sick and sticky from too much candyfloss. Or else they’d go to Holy Island. Holy Island was one of Luna’s favourite places, an island you could only reach when the tide was out. The rest of the time, it was lost to the sea. Luna thought it was desperately romantic.

Mae didn’t think that Holy Island was desperately romantic. She did think that Luna was desperately in need of a boyfriend, though, if she thought an island was sexy. Luna couldn’t quite explain it, but she liked the thought of living on that island, cut off from everyone and everything else half of the time.